Tag: writing

Empathy

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

What positive emotion do you feel most often?

For people like me (INFJ, highly sensitive, neurodivergent), empathy is a river of everpresentlovingkindness and a waterfall of tears. My mirror neurons go off for all people who struggle. Because of the negative effects that come with ADHD and Bipolar disorder, sometimes that part of me seems dammed, but it’s not. My focus has turned away, but the emotions are still there. I can’t turn them off, especially with ADHD, because there are 57 channels (and nothing’s on).

I try to focus on empathy, though, because if I didn’t I would recede into myself. For instance, my love of real world intelligence comes from more than one place. I lost a family member in Somalia who was a helicopter pilot for C/DIA, so when I see the stars on the wall at Langley, I know one of them is a personal memorial for me to visit should I get the chance. Another is spies in popular culture, but not necessarily fictional characters. “The Courier” is a true story, as is “Argo.” But those I watched as an adult. As a kid, I was introduced to James Bond and that was a love affair all its own. I didn’t want to marry James Bond. I wanted to be him.

I think that’s because I didn’t connect it that I would have to move to England to do that. I love CIA because I’m an American and feel proud of us, but I am equally obsessed with MI-6 (and the Tom Clancy level of detail that John Le Carre puts into his books). My favorite stories involve collaboration between the two institutions, which I’m sure happens all the time in real life, but isn’t reflected on screen all that often. The reason I think that is because I met a spy from London that was basically “on loan” to us for a task force on human trafficking. I thought that was infinitely cool and became interested in other countries’ intelligence agencies as well. KGB/GRU is fascinating even though I don’t particularly have a fondness for Russia itself.

I am focused on the Vietnam War era of CIA because I am indirectly writing a book about it… but the Cold War is a close second. Most of the retired spies I’ve met were active in the 80s and early 90s, steeping me in stories of East German and Russian operations and cute little Trabants. Regarding my book, it’s actually a platonic love story between two men who are trying to prevent the war from happening altogether. I do not know how the novel is going to end. That’s the best part. I want to write this book because I want to read it.

I’ll put a picture of a Trabant at the end because they’re not popular cars anymore and you simply must see one. To me, they look like pets. When Chevron and Pixar created their cartoon cars, they really missed the boat. A talking Trabant would be every bit as cute to me as a puppy.

The fact that Zac has worked in intelligence since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is not lost on me and is in fact extraordinarily meaningful. That’s because historically, queer people haven’t been allowed to be spies. It’s not because the US was actively trying to be homophobic….. I mean, they were, but there’s an extremely valid reason behind it that I cannot ignore. If they were caught, it was a short path to blackmail. Either come work for us or we’ll blow up your whole life. I don’t have any anger or bitterness against CIA for not being able to hire me, either, for a similar reason.

If I was caught, the first thing that would be done in another country is taking away my psych meds, even if they were available there. That’s because they automatically think that making me unstable is the best way to get me to talk. Joke’s on them. I wouldn’t talk, but I would be a rage-filled chihuahua (I’m 5’2). Physical withdrawal from an SSRI or mood stabilizer lasts weeks. I have a feeling that wouldn’t go well for me. It’s discrimination, but also empathy. They’re not going to allow me to be in a situation where someone takes away my medication.

Knowing that part of it comes from being a fan of both “Homeland” and “Jack Ryan.” Carrie Mathison did get made and had her psych meds denied. My bipolar disorder is far less severe than hers, but it drove the point home. James Greer was sneaking heart medication, I believe. Different drug, same issue.

It’s devastating because I really would have liked to work on the whole world’s problems at once. I’m just not dumb enough to lead the crusade in a fight to get me hired because for as much as it sucks, I agree with them. The problem, to me, is not getting hired. It’s what happens after you join. I have trouble believing that a case officer will never have to supplement or balance their brain chemicals at all during their entire career. CIA is so massive that there are plenty of jobs where you don’t have to travel at all, but if you are an operative, there’s probably not a chance in hell you’d take one.

That’s because spy agencies are hyped up by the movies to an enormous degree, and yet when I read true life spy stories, I realize that there’s a lot of the same nervous energy I felt before service at a restaurant. I’d be standing in front of a table daydreaming, prepping and nervous before the pop. Feeding hundreds of people is also an operation, and so many nights I could have used an ex-fil. 😉 If I was a current operative, a great place for me would be embedded with World Central Kitchen. I don’t think CIA likes to embed people in humanitarian organizations if they don’t have to do so, because it affects the reputation of the charity. For instance, you will never see an operative disguised as a priest or a Peace Corp officer. That being said, I think CIA should basically be Jose Andres’ right hand, because there’s no one more invisible to the rest of the world than cooks and waitstaff.

I could be The Little Gray Man because I’m just “the help.” What the fuck do I know? Meanwhile, I can learn everything without saying anything. I don’t even have to ask any questions; I can give them enough rope to hang themselves.

But it’s not in the interest of anything other than empathy. Being able to stop horrific things from happening is a worthy cause. I would love to work on saving the people of Ukraine, or perhaps saving women and girls from the Taliban. If I could pick, it would be Ukraine because I don’t necessarily want to work where it’s 110 in the shade. I grew up in Houston, and still technically live in the South. “Dry heat” only helps so much. MENA (State designation for Middle East North Africa) is a giant sandbox where the sun is actively trying to kill you. Poland sounds nice this time of year compared to that. That being said, it wouldn’t matter where I was placed based on geography. I’d just like a job where I actually felt capable. I don’t know which problem in the world would make me feel that way.

But here’s what I do know.

Jose Andres went to Ukraine/Poland out of the same empathy I would.

If you have the means, please donate to World Central Kitchen, and if you’re local, take every chance you can get to throw money in his piggy bank. Zaytinya is amazing down to the French fries.

There are more ways to love the world than just trying to stop bad things from happening. Sometimes you need to actively support the good.

If we can use intelligence to stop wars, we save lives by not putting soldiers in harm’s way. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, we averted nuclear war due to several people. Some of them were Russian assets who gave us invaluable information without Khrushchev knowing what cards Kennedy was holding, and and one submarine officer that pulled a Denzel Washington on Gene Hackman.

Now the theme to “Crimson Tide” is playing in my head.

So, when you think of my empathy, make sure it includes people I will never, ever meet. My heart is big enough to love them all.

You’re Supposed to Plan Them?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you plan your goals?

I am only now learning what is within my control and what is not. It’s only been within the last year that I’ve allowed myself to have opinions. They’re not always the correct ones, but it beats searching for the right words- not because I would like to use them, but because they are the ones that will keep others from reacting. I tried so hard to need nothing that resentment built over time. 45 years, in fact. Having all of that anger rush out had consequences, but I knew what I was putting into motion.

Relationships changed when I wouldn’t let anyone run game on me anymore. Either be up front or get out. I do not want to read your mind, nor do I want to be infantilized because of my CP or bipolar disorder. It’s my job to take care of me, and I will take input, but I don’t need coddling. I need empathy, though. Caring that I’m neurodivergent goes a long way. So does compassion for my physical limitations. But if you cannot do those things, don’t be mad when I close the door behind you. I won’t lock it. I’ll give you room to grow. But I won’t let you come back until you prove to me that you can do those things. The people who aren’t my friends do it enough.

I just don’t want that temperature in my life anymore. I don’t want to live with rage, even if it is appropriately directed. No adult likes to feel parented or that other people are frightened by their emotions to the point they feel unlovable. This is not a limited to me problem. Most ADHD/Autistic people feel this way. Our emotions are too convoluted for them to make sense most of the time. As I was telling Bryn earlier, I have never met an ADHD person that could plan a goal for shit, so what am I going to write about today?

I’m going to write about how much it sucks to be neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. We are struggling to be heard and understood. We will explain until dark when the street lights are on and Mama’s callin.’ It’s an intrinsic trait with ADHD/Autism. My particular need to expound upon everything I’ve already said once is generally a reply to someone hearing my words and don’t have any idea what dog I’m walking.

It’s Oliver, btw.

So, I’ll just ruminate until people say they get it or walk off. But even when they walk off I want to keep explaining because up until now, I cared deeply and desperately about what people thought of me, and I extended that kind of energy to everyone I met instead of keeping it to the friends I loved the most. That way, I was sure to disappoint everyone all at the same time because I was so overextended.

I have made Zac, Bryn, and Oliver my entire world because that’s as much as I can handle right now. I have so much to think about that it’s incapacitating at times, so I need to be mostly single and just focus on what’s right in front of me. It’s all ADHD/Autistic people really know.

Life with no executive function leaves me absolutely brilliant in some ways, feeling like I continually fail other people all the time because my software is different and there is a huge chasm that people dismiss all the time. Even my CP is problematic because my case is so slight it’s not as noticeable as, say, RJ Mitte. Therefore, people see me as normal when I have no balance and floppy muscles. I trip through life because I can’t not.

Very few people explain the logic behind things, and that’s all I really want to know. If I can’t figure out something on my own, I will tire and confuse my friends and family… and I know it. That’s the worst part. To know you are capable of handing out that exhaustion is devastating because you can’t change the way you were made. People alternate treating me like I have the smarts of all my favorite authors and then they spend time with me and all that goes out the window…. because when people are in adoration mode, they act completely differently once they see how my mind actually works.

I think that’s why I like the book shop at the Spy Museum so much. They don’t care if I sit on the floor and get obsessed with a subject and pull out 10 books and not buy any of them. It’s the same at the library, when I used to go. I don’t have to anymore because I can borrow them with an app on my phone (Libby), cutting out all the social interaction necessary to maintain isolation.

My self-esteem has been that low my whole life. That I have to get up the energy to even leave my house because everything becomes a Dorothy Parker quote within minutes.

What fresh hell is this?

That wasn’t terrible. That was fancy terrible….. with raisins in it.

Sometimes I’m the one that thinks them, sometimes it’s another person in reaction to me.

I can’t make anything better unless people tell me what’s wrong, and even that is a common problem. Because I do most of my communication in writing, people constantly write themselves off as “not a good enough writer to compete with me.”

First of all, you’re probably not. It’s not because you’re dumb. It’s because I’m a blogger and you’re not. I didn’t get to be a good writer overnight. I got to be a good writer by taking a knife and slicing it into a vein, bleeding out over my keyboard day after day after day after day after day.

Secondly, me being a writer is a pitiful excuse to shut down two-way communication, or extraordinary if you don’t want to be in relationship with me. That’s because it doesn’t matter to me how you communicate and what your natural style might be. It’s that you think that completely shutting down your emotions is okay. That our relationship will survive despite neither of us getting our needs met.

Zac, Bryn, and I are all good writers. Therefore, no one shuts down. And if we need to switch mediums for a conversation, we do it. Bryn calls me even when she can see I’m still typing. 😉

Because I live an hour and a half from Zac (whether I was caught in traffic or taking the train), Facebook Messenger is the most awesome thing ever invented. He sends me a picture of himself every morning so that I can see how he is before he leaves for work. I don’t have to guess, I can see it in his face.

Removing all the barriers to communication with those closest to me has been a godsend.

I don’t know if it’s the best way to plan a goal, but for ADHD/Autism, it is 90% of the time “accidentally on purpose.” I’m not sure that I could do anything differently, so I’m not a Monday morning quarterback in the way most people think. My mind moves too fast to retain all the information I need. It’s one of the reasons you’ve started getting entries every day. It’s not for me to show off. It’s for me to have a place to go when I need information about my own life. Seriously, how many of you can pick a year out of thin air and remember everything about it?

I can’t.

But my goal is being able to look it up.

It’s a plan.

What Constitutes an Emergency?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Create an emergency preparedness plan.

I consider logistics to be a nightmare scenario, and other people’s emotions to be much easier. I saw a meme the other day that made me laugh- it said “my ability to read the room is why I stay home.” While this is true, I made an agreement to be there for certain people. I can’t just wall off at will.

Yesterday Bryn was stuck by the side of the road because her car overheated. I could have done so much more had I been there physically, but I was able to be a calming presence. Had I been there, I would have tried to replace the radiator on the side of the road, because I saw someone do it once (not on her make and model, of course). Surely I’m qualified. 😛

I told her there probably wasn’t anything she could do but wait it out, but that when she got it started again, she could turn on the heater full blast- unfortunately venting the heat from the engine onto her in summer, but she’d make it farther. I was pleased she thought I knew enough about cars to call me, but I told her that in my experience, this was a call to her dad and not me. This is because her dad actually knows cars and I stood next to a mechanic for weekend warrior study…. and that was almost 10 years ago.

But I won’t forget that I was her first call in an emergency.

I knew something had happened because Bryn used Facebook Messenger to call and I was making a sandwich and thought, “I’ll call her back, I’ll be done in a minute.” Then, my phone rang. I knew something was up if Bryn was actually going to use the telephone. It was good that she did, because I could pick up the call on my watch. I warned her that she was on speaker and proceeded to impart the very, very, very little wisdom I had….. which is mostly that the radiator isn’t a hard fix depending on the car. It’s the labor that will kill you.

Again, that’s also make and model specific. I had a Nissan Pickup, a 1989 so I could work on it myself. I didn’t want to have to deal with a computer. I wanted to be able to fix everything in the parking lot of an Auto Zone if I needed, which I did….. my radiator and starter would tell you what a ride that was…… I think it’s funny that I don’t even drive now, but I’m still a gearhead.

I was right; Bryn’s dad did come and help her out, but the car still died again four blocks from her house. Crisis averted except how to get the car home and fixed. Four blocks to walk isn’t that bad. Plus, it’s the Pacific Northwest. This time of year it’s not really dark until 2200.

It was good just talking to her, because at the very least I felt like I was there even though I really wasn’t. I had to turn to reason for this one, because I felt so bad. My reasoning is that even if I was still there, I didn’t live close enough to be of much help. I would have left the house immediately, but it still would have taken almost an hour to get to her.

It makes me happy to occasionally be Bryn’s shite in nining armor, because it shows me that I’m not useless in an emergency, I have impostor syndrome. That I am weak and disabled and all the things, so I must defer to a real adult. Clearly, I need it.

I ride the line between needing someone and biting off more than I can chew in terms of independence. I don’t have to be married/have a girlfriend. Infrastructure is what I’m talking about. My adultier adult might be my landlord or my housemate. Zac is the same role to me that I am for Bryn. I would definitely call him, but I wouldn’t expect him to physically pack up and come get me unless my life was on the line. Asking a Virginian to come to Maryland is just not done. Virginia is a whole other country from here.

To ask me what I’d do in a true emergency like an EMP or kinetic attack is futile, because the best laid plans would go to shit in half a second. I know I would call Bryn, though, because she’d be there……. even if she couldn’t do anything.

I Don’t Even Want to Be Here Today

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you know the television show I’ve referenced in the title, we’d probably be good friends. It’s one of the kids on The Magic School Bus. At least once in every episode, something goes so wrong that he says “I didn’t even want to be here today.” I’m riffing, because it is now. Things didn’t start out great and devolve, they just started. I feel like the tap is dry and I’m picking through recycling, because reading my thoughts creates others I haven’t written down. I am not sure that I’ve had a thought in my head for the last 45 days that hasn’t ended up here.

It’s kind of like training for a marathon. I am building the skills I need to craft pages by using my own thoughts instead of fiction. However, in reading this blog, you have to know that of course it’s fiction. Of course it is. It’s not because I’m not telling my own truth, either. It’s that when I sit down to write, no one is here with me to say that I’m wrong.

I’m writing my observations. When people look at my stuff and say “that’s not true,” it is 100% always the case that it’s a piece of information they had and I didn’t. It may not have been malicious on their part not to tell me something, but they don’t get to take me to the mat over it, either. It is a losing game, always, and I will isolate to accommodate it. I would rather be alone than be chastised for writing about a situation in which they didn’t give me all the facts and then beat my ass for not being able to divine them. This pattern is not limited to Supergrover, but she’s the person it has happened with the most recently, so I am spiraling the fuck out. I knew I would. That’s because psychobiology is eating my lunch.

I’m feeling the panic of letting a trauma bond release and the longer it goes on the more I know this is the right choice for me, but that doesn’t lessen my thoughts and physical symptoms. Too much adrenaline is a bad thing; it’s what creates the panicked feeling when searching for dopamine. I do not think this is a limited to a me problem, because I cannot tell you how many times over the years I’ve gotten a letter from Supergrover that said “I vowed I wouldn’t respond, but.” We both have searched for the friendship we lost at different times, and it has affected both of us greatly, though not in the same ways.

Dealing with our relationship publicly is good and bad. The good? Everyone can read it. The bad? Everyone can read it. If I write about it here, there’s a hundred percent chance she’ll see it because she can tell me she won’t read all day long and it will be true for two weeks tops. If I liked Instagram, I’d feel the same way about her. We’re genuinely interested in each other and have problems with communication issues, so instead of working on the issues, we go scorched earth. Interested is relative. Maybe she loves me, maybe it’s schadenfreude…..and what I have to ask myself is does it matter?

No. It doesn’t. That’s because it feels like getting my own legend- a Santa Claus, a Tooth Fairy, an Easter Bunny- that visits in the night and leaves gifts. I do not underestimate presence as a gift, and in fact her presence means more to me than anything she could give me materially. It’s kind of fun never knowing what’s going to jog her mind, but I don’t write toward it.

I write toward her because no one else has written books about her, therefore I’m writing what I need to read. She came here looking for facts when I hadn’t recorded any. I recorded the way I felt, which is completely separate from her own memories. I couldn’t incorporate two stories because I only had two years’ worth of feelings for a 10-year relationship because she wasn’t updating me on anything. So, I write based on what I know, and she reads based on what she knows. Those are not the same “knows.”

The alternative is keeping those memories to myself and not putting them into the repository where I keep all the others. I don’t want there to be a real blog and a fake one. To me, that’s what not writing about my life means, that there’s some sort of dark magic journal where all the blackest secrets go, and you’re just getting the public layer. I cannot manage that, so I won’t. Where our issues lie is that she needs privacy and protection, and she is also my real life friend. I need guidance, she’s a brick wall. That does not work for me.

She was the person who needed privacy and protection after I’d already started writing about her, and it was a good coping mechanism for both of us at that time.

After a while, as we got deeper and deeper into our issues with each other, it wasn’t good for either one of us and I just stopped cold turkey. Now that 10 years have gone by, it’s a different ball game. A lot of the people who would take issue with the things I’ve said either don’t read it or know they don’t have a right to say anything to either one of us. Time is a beautiful thing. No one has a right to care anymore except us. 10 years ago, I knew it would be true. That I’d get here. That no one would care because it was too long ago.

I also cannot write her story according to her, because I have not heard it. The relationship is turbulent because she berates me for not reading her mind and telling our story accurately according to the picture in her mind. Her relationship with me is all in her head.

I wonder what adventures I’ve been on when I wasn’t even there.

She doesn’t know I would have wanted to hear she was angry, or sad, or depressed, or anxious, or, or, or………… She doesn’t have mental health issues per se, but I’m talking about feeling depressed or anxious stuck in a moment you can’t get out of……..

Recognizing the patterns was important. Choosing not to continue was growth. If the pattern breaks, we can be healthy again. But it won’t. That’s because I’m nothing if not loquacious and she’s nothing if not stubborn. Doesn’t mean we’re bad people. It means that I’ve grown.

I hope to God I’m wrong about everything, but I cannot hope for more. I have done all I can do. The rest is just being sad about it.

Did I mention that I don’t even want to be here today? Here is relative. In my head, it’s not so great. Downstairs? Caffeine.

The River

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What brings you peace?

As I went down in the river to pray
Studyin' about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way.....

I started this morning by singing.

I am not sure that it brings my housemates peace, but that’s not my issue.

Yesterday, I got some clarity about the relationship with Supergrover that I hadn’t had before. Her reactions looked like they have for the last eight years. She dismissed everything I was saying except the worst of the worst, when it’s not important. The things I say that are positive are every bit as powerful if only she’d take them in. But she’s not looking for that from me. From me, she wants something she can rail against, or at least, that’s how it comes across to me.

Not once has she asked me why I wrote something I did.

Not once in all of this current round of fights has she picked out anything nice to say about me. Yes, I will absolutely lose my shit at times. I will also freely hand over a large amount of love. But you can’t take it if you don’t see it. I hope that I’m getting through to her, but what I have realized is that it doesn’t matter. I’m never going to be happy with a relationship that consists of me writing something and her telling me how horrible it is that I’ve said something instead of trying to comprehend it.

You can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go, and I’m done letting her bang her purse on my head. I’ve tried too hard, and it made no difference. She is allowed to think the worst of me, because I have now done enough within myself to know that her words are complete bullshit because she’s taking everything at face value and writing off the negative as something I’m doing to spite her.

I’m not describing my emotions and my life in 3D, I have been hurt in some way and must feel like I need to destroy her.

You don’t get sentences as full of love from me as mine were if I think you’re a villain in the story. She’s not the villain, but she is definitely the antagonist. Instead of talking about it, both presenting our issues and reaching a consensus, she has walled off at every turn. It’s demoralizing to an enormous degree, because to me it’s like she became a totally different person. She couldn’t see my love and attention as a good thing.

I’m tired of having my peace disturbed, and yet there’s always going to be one more thing before she goes. Always. I could be more consistently loving if I felt it back, because there would be so much less anger involved. I could stop saying that I’m done and not done, because there’s something about the relationship that’s truly worth saving. I wonder all the time how we got to this place. How many twists and turns the path has taken, all of them good in retrospect and hell on earth then.

The thing that will stick with me is that over the last eight years, I have had fewer and fewer instances of days where she was genuinely happy and willing to reciprocate the good stuff. She has no problem expressing anger, and I hate it when I’m the target based on something I wrote with absolutely no context for what I was going through when I wrote it.

Exhaustion has set in. I think of her as the past now, because she doesn’t want a future and has told me that too many times, while also reaching out. But I’m not innocent here. I’ve also called it quits and reneged. What is interesting to me is that we kept up that fight for years without truly walking away.

I had to need peace bad enough to say the relationship wasn’t worth it. That I couldn’t live with shitty communication no matter whether we were at fault or whether it was a reflex of being virtual, not having the smarts to change mediums when it was possible.

It leaves me with a sense of panic as I move forward, but that’s because everything is unfamiliar and new, not that I’m incapable.

I have said all of this before in a hundred different ways, but it’s not for her. It’s to remind me to stay strong, that my complaints were valid…. that just because it’s not important to her, that doesn’t mean it’s not important. Her life is so big that I can see why I’ve always been in last chair, but I didn’t think I had a leg to stand on until I did.

Breaking the pattern of trying to please her so that we both got what we needed was the wrong answer for the relationship, but the right answer for me. That’s because she’s not listening to me, but I am.

I cannot tell her that I love her even when she’s angry, because she wouldn’t believe it. She stole my peace. I was writing some of the best pieces to ever come out of me whether they were angry or lovesick. She’s bound and determined to treat me as if she has low self-esteem, because if she didn’t, she would believe the positive things I say.

She would believe that I think she’s absolutely gorgeous.

She would believe that I love her anger, because when she stands up for herself, I teach myself my own value.

One of the most painful aspects of our relationship is that I’ve written this set of entries more than once, and either something I say will bring her back around, and perhaps part of seeing all the negative for her is having the will to walk away when she didn’t before.

It makes it easier to walk away when you’re angry, but it doesn’t bring you peace. I think that’s a large part of why we’ve tried so hard. Neither one of us really wanted to leave things unresolved.

I let out all my anger, she keeps hers in. I don’t think it’s personal to the two of us, necessarily. I just think she keeps a lot under wraps and this is just part of it.

This is because there is an instance in our past where she didn’t tell me something because she wasn’t sure of my reaction….. but that once became all the time.

I cannot fault her for this because I made it happen, but I can say she does bear responsibility in shutting down two-way communication. She doesn’t open up, ever, just blames me that I want those things from her. Everything is not good enough for me, when I just thought it was time to fish or cut bait because I was tired of my thoughts and feelings being invalid. That I could either walk on eggshells or not have a relationship with her at all. This is not a one-sided problem. My anger management is just now coming to fruition, because I literally needed years of distance to get over what happened between us.

I changed, desperately seeking self-compassion because I knew I could not get compassion from her while she was angry. While I was changing, she wasn’t. She’s still in the same emotional place I left her, because I realized that my anger needed to tamp down on its own, and part of the anger was everything she wasn’t saying.

She didn’t take in that our agreement was stepping into a river and going with the flow. My positive emotions were getting dammed at every turn. She stood in the negative emotions, bathed in them, took them as fact.

The entry she referenced said something about her not being able to steal happiness anymore, but she didn’t ask me why I said it. I needed to stop the neurodivergent urge to explain things more and better, and if the person isn’t listening, to try and keep explaining until you’re understood. I didn’t do anything by explaining it one time, so surely six will do it.

I learned that I needed less of all of it, because I could find the things that made me unhappy. I could not find the things that gave her joy.

As I went down to the river to pray, I learned when I studied the good old way, it just wasn’t that great.

When we should have baptized each other and walked away clean.

Lady Bits

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 12 Comments

There aren’t many professions in which men and women are treated differently anymore. That’s because most businesses have an HR department. In the kitchen, you’ve got five people on shift who don’t give a shit about anything except finishing the night intact. Words are said. It’s always awful. You still don’t tell anyone anything, because it’s not that they’re gross, you’re uptight. If you don’t act like one of the guys, you can’t really survive in the kitchen, because there’s no respect for women except mothers. Not you, of course, but their own. The one who stood over them and taught them how to cook. Men treating women with respect in the kitchen has never been a thing. Julia Child was not a trailblazer because she worked for OSS. She’s a trailblazer because she made it through culinary school at all.

I have had the idea for an SNL skit for years (take it if you write for them) because of Julia. I read in the newspaper that Julia kept her phone number public long after her books were published and her television show was airing. The idea for the skit is that someone calls and she thinks it’s a home cook, but it’s CIA needing help on an old op or something. The entire conversation could be had because the information CIA needs is actually in cooking jargon.

She did make a shark repellent recipe. It’s a start.

The fun part is thinking about what “cassoulet,” “bechamel,” and “eclair” might have to do with spy jargon.

The writing prompt came from someone in my lady line cooks group who asked how to get men off her ass when she’s on her period, because she didn’t have enough to tolerate their bs today.

I said, “I compensate by being a complete bitch all the time so they can’t tell.”

It’s funny ’cause it’s true. I’m just not loud about it. Kinkaid can tell what I need with a look.

One of the reasons it’s so easy to get in the weeds is that so much of communication does become rote that you don’t talk about it, so you can’t recover from a mistake as fast. If you forget to drop a burger first and they want well done, there is no possible way it’s going to be on time. That’s throwing your waitstaff to the wolves, something I try very hard not to do. I will say that for all the waitstaff I’ve worked with, I’ve never dated any of them so they all remember me fondly.

This is generally the case in kitchens. Waitstaff jobs attract pretty actresses. The kitchen draws queer people to a moth like a flame, mostly women and men who won’t admit it because the homophobia is just that bad. Or there’s the alternative, the honey badger don’t care sexual assault. That dude does not care whether you like women or not. Whatever they’re packing is better than anything you’ve ever had and they believe it like Pete Davidson.

Chefs are known for thinking that they’re God’s gift to dick, and they lord it over female employees in the most subtle of ways as not to get caught. It’s bad for the women who reject them because there’s 20. It’s worse for the ones that think he’s serious and actually likes them.

People break up the mojo of the team all the time by sleeping together. Basically everyone pretends not to care, but they do. It’s not that our coworkers are boning, it’s that they do the job differently. They’re not as careful because they’re tired and they know fuckboy will excuse them, but he’ll beat hell down on us.

So, people are bitter and talk shit. If you can keep your relationship under wraps, it’s fine until you break up. Then all hell goes with it.

Dana and I could work together because we were both line cooks, but I gave her the authority of a chef because she had her stripes and I didn’t. That’s not true of most couples, and a few times it wasn’t even true of us. But we did a hell of a lot better than most couples. It didn’t get messy at work until after we left the kitchen.

Most of the time, two line cooks dating each other doesn’t happen because queer men aren’t on the line very often and neither are lesbians (we make up a disproportionate percentage, but still very small). It’s not that straight couples on the line don’t exist, it’s just not as prevalent for a straight woman and a straight man to cook together. Most of the time, when cooks are together, they work at different restaurants. When Dana and I had different jobs, I hated it. Absolutely hated it. This is because if we weren’t at work together, I didn’t see her.

My kitchen life doesn’t have room for anyone else, and everyone feels the same way. We all lead two lives. The one on the line, and the one where we’re helpless against the tide of people asking why we haven’t been to X or Y in a hundred years. God forbid someone actually takes in in that we’re sorry and we mean it, but you meet at 6:00 PM.

Mothers hate every holiday ever, because you’re not going to see us without three years’ notice. Moms do not understand when yes, they’re important, but so is having your ass on grill by five. It affects your future to a much larger degree. It shouldn’t, but it will. It’s a meritocracy.

Also, no one talks to anyone. So if you miss a shift and the manager isn’t there to tell everyone you died or someone close to you did, we will bitch the whole time about your absence and how you probably had brown bottle flu, but when we find out what really happened, you have never seen a team motivate faster in your life.

Being agile as a female cook is harder than being male once you have children. You can put up with all the shit until then. But no restaurant in the world is going to like it if you have a hard out, no matter what time it is. If you’re on day shift, you might be done by three, you might not. Roll with it. If you’re night crew, you might be done at 8:00, you might be done at midnight. Roll with it. That’s because restaurants have a system. If we’re not busy, no owner wants to pay labor. So, you might get three hours of work that day. You might get 12. You need to be prepared for either eventuality. People who show up for morning shift prepared to bust ass all day are worth their weight in gold because a hundred things could conspire to ruin dinner, and having a day crew that can cover prep while we chase down a problem saves everything. Because waitstaff makes tips and we make salary, I prefer being on day shift because it’s the easiest way to get paid more…. not in terms of salary. In terms of the number of hours you can get. It adds up.

I remember once I was worried that Supergrover didn’t have a job and I told her I could set her up with a sweet dishwashing gig in Columbia Heights. That’s funny on two levels. The first is that she’s buttoned up tight like Lindsay. Not because that’s who she is, that’s who she plays on TV. Just like Lindsay.

Therefore, the image of her washing dishes in Brooks Brothers was priceless, as was the thought of her washing dishes at all because I know her quite well. She doesn’t like cooking. She likes to have cooked.

What I do know is that her executive style rubbed off on me. I learned to stand up for myself easier. To notice when I had seniority and order people around like they did to me, because they didn’t have any more reason to tell me what to do than I did them. When chef isn’t there, you have to be loud and assertive, otherwise people will run right over you.

There’s never a way to be a “good” woman in a kitchen. You’re either going to get run over or seen as the biggest twatwaffle known to God and man when you try to flex. The hard part when you’re intimidated (if you’re me) is being 5’2 and arguing with someone is bigger, stronger, and generally angry at me because I’m a woman and my opinion means nothing.

I am lucky in that I have only had one job like that, the one in Silver Spring. It was no small consolation to learn that the owners had run the restaurant into the ground, just like I knew they would, seconded by my chef.

The rest of the time, it’s just been random comments and not constantly.

Most of the time, no one has noticed my lady bits.

The sad part is that it’s not because I wouldn’t want people to see me that way. It’s that in order to stand out, I have to blend in.

If you want to throw down in a kitchen because you think you’re being treated unfairly, focus on the food you make for yourself. Let everyone see what you’re doing. Let them have a bite. Cooks don’t listen with their ears. Respect will come from “how did you do that?”

The motto of the international brotherhood of line cooks is “we don’t have to talk about it. Just eat it.”

If you study hard, at least one of those times you’ll walk away feeling like God’s gift to something…… probably Pete Davidson.

Rose

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Doctor Who has been running in the UK since 1963, but not continuously. “Rose” is the title of the first of what is now called “New Who.” Every day, I realize that her story tells mine, because if you watch her story from beginning to end, you see mine so clearly without me actually having to say anything.

Most people don’t see what happens when the TARDIS lands on their lawn in real life. Doctor Who doesn’t even really take the companions’ families into account. I have seen the look on Mickey’s face, and I never want to see it ever again.

I didn’t run toward Supergrover because she was romantically interested in me. I ran toward her because I could not travel and stay in place. Time always moved forwards, but at different rates in all three of my lives. Doctor Who showed me characters that suffered just as much under these constraints as I did. That it got harder and harder to go back to Mickey when you were fighting alien battles on distant planets or seeing the last day on Earth.

And, just like in the show, companions get tired and want to go back to their real lives.

The Doctor hates goodbyes.

I had that moment just like Rose did, of feeling butterflies. But they never mattered. Therefore, the way I feel is that there is a thread of me in every companion. That I am definitely Rose because I fell in love with The Doctor. That I am definitely Martha because she fell in love with The Doctor and got over it. I am definitely Clara because I am The Impossible Girl. I am definitely Amy Pond because I got used to waiting on my suitcase. I am also Amy in that I’d like to have other romantic interests while we are traveling together, and that is a delicate balance. I couldn’t move on with my life while our relationship was unclear because our agreement would have changed the world. I couldn’t go to another person and say “I’m with you, but only up and to a point.” Not many partners love when the TARDIS lands, but they’re fucked because they know anyone would go. It’s not personal.

Because she physically travels and I don’t, it is very much a relationship of convenience because I don’t have to care what time it is. Maybe she’s up, maybe she’s not. Best case scenario is when I get her on a long haul flight. It’s not that it really matters, just the image of her curled up reading my words means more than she has ever imagined.

Our relationship creates responsibility for me. The companions know up front that they’re going to do things no one will understand and people just have to roll with it. They’re going to show up at the same party but forget that they need to change back into their original clothes. I made it where my life could accommodate this because it was too hard trying to manage two lives.

We had different emotional requirements. Hers was always to move forward, and it irritated her that I wrote backwards because she didn’t want to think about the past. She didn’t see it as affecting her future. That the fights would continue to occur because we weren’t actively seeking common ground. At no time did that mean I wanted to stop being the one who stands there and watches her be clever.

The Doctor deserves that.

The only thing that The Doctor has is that her magic is created by real-life situations, and theirs is created by who they are. They can change things because they are Time Lords. No one asked them, they just showed up.

I am also River Song, born of the time vortex, but as a child, before she knew how her story with Amy and The Doctor would end. This is because I knew that my destiny was to be a companion, and not The Doctor’s Wife. Bonded to them by circumstance, happenstance, yet bound nonetheless. I hate to say that Supergrover missed a lot by not watching that show, but that’s not my call. 😉

That’s because she would have learned the sense of duty that being a companion requires. How there is no love greater than to lay down your life for your friends. That I didn’t make a sacrifice because of anything but it needed doing.

I heard the emergency brakes, and I grabbed my suitcase.

I thought of Michael and me as every companion combination ever, but it was humorous to picture him as Alex Kingston (River Song). That’s because everyone else has been more of a dalliance and River Song is the real deal. They are married in canon.

The problem in all my relationships has been how to explain this one. I can’t believe it’s been under my nose the whole time.

I am Jack Harkness, the relentless flirt that still does everything for everybody no matter how he feels. He can die on command. 😛

This is also me every time my beautiful girl makes me blush. I love it when my cheeks get hot because she’s struck comedy gold, and I hope to bring it out more when I write about her character. I want to be 3-dimensional in the best way possible. To be perfectly honest, I don’t even know what “Flat Stanley” means, but I have taken it to mean a term of endearment because there’s no way on God’s green earth that it’s true.

But if I hold the right to give her my feelings as fact, so does she.

The fact is that because she doesn’t watch Doctor Who, she has no idea the capacity for love that my friendships entail. They aren’t modeled very often. Maybe Will and Francie on “Alias.” I loved the Benedict Cumberbatch film “Courier,” because it was a very good example of the kind of platonic love story I would write if I could. Friendships like that cover all sorts of genres, and I could write Shirley Maclane and Olympia Dukakis in my sleep.

Supergrover will absolutely slap Ouiser Boudreaux, and sometimes it’s me.

Doctor Who is a big enterprise I’m using to describe this relationship because it’s international. I use the love of God in equal measure, mostly because God brings many names and I think one of them is The Doctor. There aren’t really many examples of doing what needs to be done, and I’ve met two of them. It was only in retrospect that I learned I’m one of them.

If there’s anything that Supergrover did for me that means more than all the other stuff combined, she proved to me that I was capable of being a companion.

Every one has that moment where they go from freaked out to being able to hang. Supergrover just didn’t know how that presented, and I didn’t handle it well. I felt like I was in the TARDIS alone a lot of the time,

Now is the parting of the ways, but I am not stepping away. I know that if you hear the emergency brakes once, you’re likely to hear them again.

I don’t want to go.

I Don’t Admire Professions

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What profession do you admire most and why?

In the United States, we have a tendency to focus on what we do for money, even at parties. It’s not a party conversation, but we have them all the time. Washington can be soulless like that. I have had several people see me out and about with my sister. When she walks away, they ask me how much money she makes. First of all, ask her that. Second of all, she’s a Democrat. AIM LOW.

I make Washington less soulless because even though Lindsay’s crowd is political, my words are not and they need a break. You can see the table relax when my sister says, “This is Leslie. She’s a writer.” Or “she’s a cook.” The writer thing is only seen as positive when both of us make it clear I’m not a journalist. That’s a tupperware party I’m just not going to host. The difference is that if someone knows you’re a journalist, they’ll monitor everything they say because they think you’re looking for sensitive information. Bloggers don’t do that. They’re looking for a slice of real life, and politics is anything but that.

I’ll give you a for-instance in a completely fictional example that could indeed happen the longer I live here.

If Kamala Harris and I met, I would not remember the date or time. I would not remember much of what she said. But I’d remember the way her hair sparkled in the sun, whether her hugs were memorable, whether she smelled like generic soap or a perfume I’d recognize, definitely whether she was wearing Chucks or not.

I wouldn’t even say on my web site that I met Kamala Harris, most likely, because the higher you go in government salary, the less of your schedule is published. I wouldn’t want to say that I met her on a day she was supposed to be in Ukraine. In Washington, you learn to think like that no matter who your friends are, because you know you’ll have to do it for at least one person in your life, so why not do it for all of them? I doubt there would ever be a scenario in which I met a public figure at a time where they weren’t supposed to be there, but it is the nature of living in the federal city and not watching them on the news.

If I did respect a job, it would be journalism. I am very, very picky though. I figure out my favorite columnists and stick to them like glue (Shane Harris, Greg Miller). I will buy their books (I have most of David Halberstam’s, several of Rachel Maddow’s, and “The Apprentice” by Greg Miller). As I was telling Supergrover, I like to read novels, but I do not like to write them. I find that journalism jogs my brain for blogging, and I am in a rut with fiction because I am working on my own content right now. Novels will come back soon. I have just gotten into the groove. I don’t think “let’s go see what’s on the Internet today.” I think, “let’s go make the Internet today.”

Disrespect of someone’s profession comes from years and years of being tired of listening to complaints about people’s lives. If they don’t like what they do, why should I ask them? I would much rather ask them what they love. This works with anyone, because everyone has that thing. For me, it’s writing content for the web…. but not because it makes me popular. It’s that when I didn’t have any readers at all, I changed myself an entry at a time. Just because other people read my entries now doesn’t mean that it’s not all about self-improvement. I do the same thing I’ve always been doing. I wake up, think about my life for a few minutes, and the urge to write wakes up hungry.

I want to hear about that fire in other people. For Supergrover, it was also writing, She’s a blogger and writes children’s fairy tales that I hope to God one day I am old enough to understand. She writes clearly and beautifully, but what I mean is that I do not have a child’s heart anymore……… but she does. I will never carry a tenth of her little-kid wonder.

For Bryn, it’s all kinds of things. She likes cooking, gardening, making, being outside, having dogs……. all of it is creativity she pours into her relationships with animals (and dirt).

For Zac, it’s all the same stuff Bryn does on a smaller scale. He loves hiking and being outside with Oliver. The fact that what Zac does for money is my real life interest is a new thing. I am never more interested in what he has to say than when it’s about life inside his intelligence agency. His is a generic one that collects raw data from all the others, but he has the backstage pass to places like CIA and NSA.

It’s nice to know that even if I only have lawn seats, I can giggle with Zac after the show.

And yet it’s another relationship in which our interests feed each other to an enormous degree, because what I want to know isn’t even close to classified. It’s not important to me whether he has chatter on Iran, although I will definitely be listening to that if he does. It’s that he can tell me what his day to day life is like. He tells me when he’s going into a  no personal gadgets building, and because we’re both on the think it, say it plan, when I’m on a government computer and when I’m not (as in sending to his work computer). I learn what circumstances dictate being in a SCIF vs. why he’s actually there. Does that make sense? I want to know everything without knowing anything.

I’m dating the man who’s president of his queer group at the agency and it’s definitely not “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military anymore. Zac is also in the Navy Reserves, and I want to hear about every waking moment of that, too. That’s because he got to learn what it was like to walk into other countries and have people know they were talking to an intelligence officer based on past history with other people………… and being able to sniff them out so that he can deflect questions in advance.

I called him an intelligence officer, but I’m using a generic term because I don’t know military slang. He was active duty in the Navy and his job was intelligence. What that’s actually called is beyond me. Now, he works at a national intelligence agency and does his Navy stuff as a side gig. 😛

If I tell you what I love, it’s going to be reading and writing. But people vastly underestimate how much I actually write because blog entries seem like they take a very long time. If I’m going full stream of consciousness like I do on this blog every day, I type as fast as I think and generate about a page of single spaced type every two or three minutes. I have found that I am getting faster at this by writing every day, because it’s difficult to sum up a week at once. Much easier to sum up a few hours.

Even the conflict I was talking about the other day doesn’t matter now. I thought I was being told one thing, I was being told another. Once the communication freakout was over, I got back in on the ground floor of something exciting. Doesn’t mean the conflict wasn’t worth remembering in the past. Just that I’m glad it all resolved in the best way possible for all parties.

But no one takes into account just how long it takes to nurse an idea, or how long I slave over other ideas in addition to blogging.

I have also learned something important. If I want to be successful at a party, tell everyone I’m a professional cook. If I don’t, tell them I’m a writer.

So I suppose that if I admire a profession, it’s writing……. only because someone has to.

It might as well be me.

Assemble, Prepare, Adjust, Discard, Modify, Complete

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 6 Comments

My friend Emily is a teacher in Seoul, and we were talking about our lives. How everything about us makes us, well, us. We weren’t close in high school, but we both went through the same process (performing arts high school vs. “real high school”) and therefore both are driven to create. This entry is kind of “Your Blog Makes You Sound Like a Dick: Kitchen Edition, Part II,” but I decided that I didn’t need as much authority when I’m talking about being subservient for a purpose.

Creativity is a hard mistress. But that’s exactly what Emily wanted to know.

My head plays music when I cook, if this even makes sense. Not music I’ve heard, just tuneless sound that progress in order of mood depending on how the food is going. It makes me hum. I’m interested in what happens when you assemble, prepare, adjust, discard, modify, complete

It’s such a complete question that I had to think about it for a couple days before I was ready to address it. There’s an attack to cooking, and a laserlike focus. What there is not is room for error. Life comes in ticket times, the most important thing for every diner there. Whether you fold under the pressure or not is your own doing, completely. I respect a dishwasher that walks out during the first shift rather than thinking they can do a job and dragging everyone else down with them. It is why I left the kitchen to an enormous degree. I was making other people slower.

That doesn’t take away the burn, literally or figuratively. It’s an essential ingredient to creating a life in which you don’t want to escape. You don’t need drugs because you live them. The kitchen is a living, breathing organism from which there is no escape. My books have more in common with Jonna and Tony Mendez’s than they don’t. Both cooking and spying require a relentless focus without thinking of the outside world at all. To do so would be paralyzing.

People with ADHD do this better than most. Because we have no executive function, we hyperfocus on the thing at hand, a better coping mechanism for most in the race against the clock that being a cook requires. Nearly every kitchen employee I’ve ever met who decided to do it long term is because their brains and the kitchen’s rhythm fit together like a glove. People who can’t hack it should leave quickly, and often do.

Executing an idea is one thing. Prepping it for large scale is quite another. That’s because cooks play around until they like something without any recall as to how they did it to precise measurements. Did we throw in a teaspoon? Who the fuck knows? Eat it.

To prepare something for a large scale, you have to take the idea and retroactively fit it. My best example of this is hearing a pop song on the marching field. The marching band can play the melody, but it sounds off by a wide margin because everything the singer did to personalize it is gone, plus the rhythms try to mimic it and nobody has time for that.

Preparing a recipe in a restaurant is to make that dish a hundred times with different variations because you’re trying to get the best version of it on paper that you can, because you can’t really capture lightning twice. You can try, but it’s chasing the same high as everyone else.

Once a recipe is divided up, it goes into separate parts of the kitchen. A good for-instance is a steak salad. The salad is made by pantry, the steak is made by grill, and we meet in the middle. What I have come to call the ballet on the brigade.

Assembling is often more difficult than you think over a certain amount of time. By hour five you are not the same team that you were at hour two. You’re too exhausted to communicate and too behind not to try. Part of getting in the weeds is setting everything up perfectly so that if you get into the weeds, you can recover quickly. Being in the weeds is being 50 tickets deep and not panicking while expo and chef are breathing down your neck. There’s also a group project aspect, and I have caused mine to flunk. I have thought people have done things that they haven’t and paid for it, like assuming that another line cook was frying the chicken I needed, but they weren’t. We hadn’t made stations on boundaries clear. It always made me feel like the worst player in the game. I wasn’t, I was just bad at talking out loud. People would ask me what I was doing and I’d tell them and they’d tell me they didn’t need my excuses. For what? I am explaining what you asked me to explain.

The benefits outweigh the costs to an enormous degree. It ruins you for any other job quickly because going to the office feels like cutting off a limb when you’ve been on the A-team of a well-oiled machine. It is worth the arthritis and burns and cuts to feel like you actually did something that day. It’s the job you can’t wait to leave until you actually try to fit back into your old life. Maybe you can do it, maybe you can’t. Most ADHD people cook long enough to know that there’s a reason why they fit into a kitchen and they don’t fit into an office.

It costs an enormous amount to be a cook, because you’re just far enough above the poverty line not to get health insurance from your job and not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Therefore, you have to purchase your own insurance with no subsidy from anyone. Meanwhile, you always need a doctor for something. Most likely it’s arthritis and chronic pain. Sometimes wound care.

We work like doctors who stay over after their shifts because they can’t come down from the adrenaline of treating patients all night. If we’re not cooking, we want to be with other cooks in the restaurant, anyway. We’ll sit at the bar and talk to the bartenders, occasionally talking to a cook if they’re allowed to breathe at all.

Most of the time, they’re not.

There is a limited amount of time between one shift and the next. We have to look at what we’re selling and what we’re not, because we have to be able to plan forward with accuracy. We can’t make six orders of fried chicken if we only have enough for three because we didn’t think we’d sell that many. All restaurants have this problem. It’s a matter of degree.

The reason cooking requires such high intensity energy is that you start getting tired and you can’t stop. It’s great in the beginning. The first three hours are AMAZING. But when your shoulders are aching from being five foot two and flipping a full paella pan, you still have to keep moving for four more hours. People think about the hours we spend in the kitchen assembling, cooking, and serving. They vastly underestimate the number of hours of prep that go into every meal. That it takes a team of people on the line and in the back to keep up with demand. Prep cooks do not need to speak with as much authority as line cooks, because it’s not their ass on the line if something burns. They’re literally out of the heat. We prep everything that needs to be cooked, they prep everything that doesn’t. Line cooks don’t give orders, they give supervision. I have been the one that has chopped 20lbs of mushrooms into small dice and the person that watched over someone else to make sure they did it the way chef taught me. The thing most people do is call all cooks “chef.” This is irritating and incorrect. Chef means boss, and those motherfuckers will remind you of it constantly. It’s a meritocracy. You don’t argue with it, you decide toward running your own kitchen or you don’t. Every cook has their level. For me, I would be a horrible chef because of all the administrative paperwork and inventory. I have watched lots of people turn down chef and sous jobs for that very reason. We were made to be weird. Chefs were made to be “the man.” It is very much like being an executive director for an arts organization, because even though you’re enabling creatives, you still have to talk about money. There is nothing worse than working for owners that constantly disagree with your staff so that you’re constantly hung out to dry on personnel matters. You can’t always go back to the kitchen and tell the employees that their demands, once again, have been ignored. The owners who do this to chefs really do not care about turnover. Cooking is a small enough interest that if you fuck over a cook at one restaurant, they’ll never work for you again and they’ll tell all their friends. It will not go unnoticed.

It affects the art of completion to an enormous degree, because you cannot be the same restaurant if you have an A-team and keep submarining it. It’s a crime when you’ve got a great team and dismantle it because someone wants a dime raise or needs a day off. Most cooks don’t have the ambition to dream big because they’re only focused on improving the food.

They’re not asking you to give them the whole world. Just to help assemble, modify, and complete it….. and that other stuff Emily said.

Nothing You Don’t Need

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?

The idea of working retail appeals to me as long as I don’t have to count on the store to be successful in order to eat. I just don’t like retail. I would put out what there is and say “good luck.”

I think I would like owning a bookstore, but I’d read them the whole time I was there- or sit with my tablet and keyboard at the till, hoping not to treat customers like they’re the irritating, unnecessary evils they are at other stores. I’d still want to be polite, but no one would expect that of me if the books were in random order. Being a grumpy asshole proprietor is non-negotiable in that scenario. But again, it’s a store where I don’t have to sell anything. People see what they like and give me money.

I do not have to show them anything, point out how they could save money overall by buying 10 books instead of three, etc.

I know within myself that I could be good at selling books because it is not the same as selling cars. I would be good at selling cars, too, because I have that preacher’s kid personality show…. but I wouldn’t use it because it’s bullshit. It’s not the real me. The real me is the cranky jackass in Parts.

I went to a store once in Memphis that said, “if we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” The store was just stacks and stacks of crap. Good luck finding anything. And yet, you could strike gold if you looked long enough. Everybody knows that feeling…. grateful you don’t have to go to Marshall’s and Target because TJ (TK) Maxx had it……… but you didn’t know they had it until you went through everything and part of the time you sat on the floor.

That’s the kind of shop I’d run. It would be a glorious mess no matter what was in it. But even if it were only books and books alone, I wouldn’t sell nothing you don’t need.

Observations, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am spread out on Zac’s bed as Oliver cuddles my feet. Zac is in New Orleans, so I’m on puppy duty. I don’t like being here while he’s not here as much as I do when he is, but Oliver is a 24 hour friend. He is just there for me and all my dog-cuddling needs.

I’m grappling with how to move on in one sense and how to stay in another. Being present and showing up, but also being sensitive to my friends’ needs as well. No one is more important, I just have to struggle with how much I’m willing to take on at any given moment. I have reached my breaking point, but it doesn’t matter that I’m here. It matters how I respond. I can’t fold into myself and be comforted by isolation. I don’t want it anymore.

I also reserve the right to stay home and lick my wounds. Balance.

I could tell you more, but I won’t. It’s sensitive and not worth the hassle of blowing everything up. I don’t want to live with it, and I don’t want to live around it.

I thought I was in on the ground floor of something, and it blew up in my face. I let someone into a sacred space, and was welcomed and rejected within hours. I don’t deal with whiplash well, and I’m spiraling out in my own head while not trying to talk about it here.

It’s the balance of being respectful and writing around things on purpose because to tell the real story would cause more harm than good. I have more experience doing this than anyone can possibly imagine. But just because I’m good at it doesn’t mean that I want to.

Living my life out loud has consequences that I care about this time. It’s what happens when you have good boundaries. You don’t let just anyone stomp all over them, but you make the agreement with people to be the one that’s willing to throw down with them when you’re in every mood known to God and man. There’s no option not to pick up the phone, because you said you’d be there. It’s not a matter of going to extremes. It’s a matter of adjusting boundaries so that everyone feels safe, even if it’s hell on earth right now.

Hell on earth is relative, because it won’t last long. It is born of confusion and grief for something I thought was solid.

I don’t want to change too much too fast, and the adrenaline of a moment comes down. It always does. It is the dance of intimacy. You get close to someone, and then you can’t handle being that intense, so you back off. That cycle runs on repeat for the length of a relationship no matter what it is. Even coworkers. Sometimes you want to be near them. Sometimes you don’t. That can vary by the day.

Life is full of those gray areas, but it’s not about whether you’re enough for someone or you’re not. It’s being clear in communication so that no one has expectations they can’t handle because they don’t know how to meet them. Figuring it out takes more time than people are willing to spend thinking about how they want to react, and not looking at their reactions after they’ve happened to make sure the decision they made was right for everyone.

Not doing it leads to nuclear fallout. It escalates prank wars, real wars, Facebook comment sections……….

No one thinks of real world consequences on Facebook.

I can say with clarity and honesty that my beautiful girl and I didn’t. Everything was a dance of intimacy that bordered on two extremes. It’s not the situation I’m talking about here, but it’s a good example of it. If Facebook messenger had been then what it is now, there would be much less of a problem. Boundaries could have been created and maintained with the button that indicates “video call.” Doing everything through writing cost us a connection and gave us another. It affected how we related to each other with HUGE differences between, as Zac would say, “meet space and meat space.”

I should have had to sit with her anger. She should have had to sit with my fear. I should have seen her eyes when we talked all that through.

Knowing that not everything can be done virtually is like breathing for me now, and I pay attention to it closer than I ever have. This is because I spend so much time in this space, the one where everything centers on writing, I am prone to forget that I need things like hugs and kisses, too.

It’s a complicated construct, and the first step to managing it is being aware. That the things you say in instant messages and e-mails matter. You are not putting on a game with someone else’s feelings. It just seems like it because the leap in someone’s head is too great. That if you feel something here, you won’t feel it in person. That’s okay.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that because I’m direct, people often bite off more than they can chew because they think they’re playing with me and they’re not. What I’m saying to you via writing is the exact same thing you’d get in person…. I would say things completely differently, but the reaction is the same. I am hearing you and adjusting everything based on what you say.

My relationship with my beautiful girl broke down because of this very dynamic. She felt threatened, like she was being scolded and there were all kinds of recriminations. In reality, I would say “this is what you’re doing that hurts me. Please adjust.” She was not direct with me in saying “this is what you’re doing that’s hurting me. Please adjust.” Instead of going toe to toe with me, she held it all in and said I was painting my feelings as fact. What I wanted her to do was paint her feelings as fact as well, because they are. I can argue logic. I can’t argue emotion. How she feels is how she feels. I think you can only paint your feelings as fact because of this.

I wanted to dive into her, it’s just that her depth was about 4 feet deep and diving requires more than that. I do not mean that she is not deep. I am talking about respecting limits on how far down I’m allowed to go and all those breathing apparatuses.

My analogy for this is that we both said things that got us to 12 feet and then we tried to take it all back and it was too late.

But I’m telling you about this relationship in order to protect another, because my beautiful girl is not the only one that deserves a hard out.

But these are just my observations.

This Thing We’ve Created and Managed

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m thinking about the -email that I got from my beautiful girl this morning. It came a few days ago, but she made a lot turn over in my head that’s just not finished. Here’s the line that got me in a good way. She said something about me deciding I was the only arbiter of the friendship/relationship. I said something bothered me, she adjusted. I was upset at last interaction that she called it “this thing we’ve created and managed,” and I felt like I’d been mortally wounded. It seemed very dismissive of what we’d built and/or destroyed.

The entire truth of our relationship rests on that slash.

Because that slash rests on our burn. We can’t sit down and “and/or our way through something.” I’ll say too much, she’ll say too little. She is content to let me think what I think, when I’m starving for her input. I’m the arbiter of our relationship because she stopped throwing down. We couldn’t move any better, stronger, or faster than the day before because when she walls off, my history is to go off like a chihuahua because her distance makes my trauma bond scream.

At the same time, she’s not responsible for treating me or bending toward me just because I’m having a moment. I have never been telling her to jump in and fix things. I’ve been telling her that if she wants a relationship with me, here’s what I need from her. If not, we can’t have a relationship because too much has happened for me to both manage those trauma bonds and the relationship concurrently. That’s because when she wants me to be close, I don’t have a problem with that. I have a problem with middle-of-the-road, will they or won’t they bullshit. I cannot de-escalate anything because either the trauma bond goes off or it doesn’t. There’s no middle ground. It feels very much like being an addict. If I can’t have hard drugs because I’m addicted to them, the right answer is not “just do a little bit less heroin.” There are so many layers as to why I have a trauma bond that screams, but part of it is that there’s not just one. We have the childhood trauma dump, and what I’ve come to call “the hard out.” I cannot tell you everything I know, and I cannot tell you everything she knows, either.

So, part of the reason that I paint my feelings as fact is that I am trying to talk around a lot of shit. I am weaving the tale as I see it according to the limits I’m trying to enforce, because I have a hell of a story I’m not writing at the same time I’m trying to describe my life. But whatever anyone knows outside the two of us, it’s not enough to make sense of anything that I could say if things were different.

So, I would imagine that when Supergrover thinks I’m bagging on her, she’s not getting the real story before my blog entries get published, so when she reads, she’s not taking it into account. That I am not blaming her, I am blaming the situation and circumstances because I cannot actually tell you about the situation and circumstances.

In protecting her, I have probably made things worse. But I don’t feel bad about it, because there’s no possible way that I’d be okay without being able to use this space as a tool. I write my way into and out of things all the time. She’s an easy target because she brought those circumstances into my life, but I am not taking my anger out on her. I project that anger onto the character because I have a hard out.

I am exhausted and I feel it in my bones. That I know we’ll be successful, but not based on anything that happened in the past. She’s going to have to step up, because I’ve adjusted my vision and realized the ways in which we aren’t good for each other. I have told her those things a number of times, and while she has managed to say what she doesn’t like, she’s never said what she does. I mean, even to the minimum. I know she likes Diet Coke and coffee. I know she likes Jack Daniels. I know she likes pizza. I know those things about most of America. Random factoids that have added up in all kinds of ways, but those I can talk about… because they’re not close to the hard out.

Nothing that I have written on my web site in 10 years has had the real story, and it never will. So my process is trying to find things I can write about. It’s not sordid or illicit. It’s the purest love I’ve ever known. Still can’t talk about it.

Trauma bonds are tricky because again, when you try to break them it makes you weak, like physical withdrawal. I can handle being away from her the longer it goes on, because when we’re not interacting I’m not feeding said bond milk and cookies. I’m not babying it and allowing it to grow.

And none of it is even close to her fault, because I could deal with the hard out so much better if we were collaborating. It’s not a hostage situation over here. I am not saying, “I have a trauma bond so you must accommodate me.” I am saying that both being together and apart causes different sets of problems and I need to know which one I’m working on today. Our relationship going up and down like a roller coaster was making my trauma bond feel like dopamine and depression in a continuing cycle because I could not achieve homeostasis. I don’t have a crush that’s out of control.

I never have.

What I need is more e-mails like this one, that recognize we both participated. We both need to adjust to each other and get with the program. The clue phone is ringing in terms of where we need to go to be stable and happy. Those options are two extremes, because it’s not child’s play. It’s the nature of our friendship/relationship in this thing we’ve created and managed.

Here’s what I know. When she’s really taking it in, she’s doing everything in the most wonderful way she knows how. It’s when she stops listening that there’s a problem. Here’s what I mean. She really saw me. She saw how much it bothered me for her not to call it a friendship or a relationship because it doesn’t honor what we’ve actually been through. It minimizes it to an enormous degree.

It’s the thing that proves to me that Michael and I aren’t the only ones who will come, because she loves her girl, too.

The small things are the big things.

Because I have a hard out.

The Man Who Regrets, and the Man Who Forgets

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

The title comes from a Doctor Who episode about The Moment. The Moment is a weapon that can take billions of lives, but has developed a consciousness and you have to reason with it and accept your fate before it will activate. The Moment stays with The War Doctor as he grapples with whether to blow up Gallifrey to save the universe from collapse. The Moment is with The War Doctor when he’s with Ten and Eleven. The Moment tells The War Doctor that this is who he will become if he blows everything up….. that he will live long enough to become the man who regrets, and the man who forgets.

It resonates with me today as I look back over 40 straight days of posting, because I talk a lot about regrets and remorse so I can change myself going forward. I forget to play. I forget to explore alternate universes and dream bigger. In my last entry, the alternate history was staying with Kathleen long enough to have had kids, but I didn’t change anything about the relationship itself. Everything that cost me would have continued right on being expensive.

I’m trying to get smarter about where my energy goes. I haven’t lost myself in new relationship bliss because I’ve stayed motivated to write to my heart’s content, which is far more than I thought it would take to keep it happy. I am relentless about self-discovery, and I truly do not love when other people think they’re the main character. They’re the main character when we’re interacting, but they do not have a lock on our memories together because we were having different experiences when those interactions occurred. How I perceive someone shouldn’t have bearing on how anyone else sees someone because they’re not going to get the same interaction I did. They bring a different set of experiences to the table.

Those are difficult conversations to have, which is why it’s easier for me to have partners and friends who either get it or don’t care. People who get it see everything I write about them. They lived it. They don’t have to love it. They know when our conflict is resolved in real life, it will be resolved here. That I do not have a preconceived notion of who they are and expect confirmation bias. I am a diarist, and the only reason I’m considered good at blogging is that it’s not very popular anymore. It’s easier to stand out, the way it was when both Dooce and I had 200 readers on a good day.

I absolutely tanked the blog that made me in a fit of rage. I didn’t have the coping mechanisms to deal with blowback that I do now, and I couldn’t get mad at anyone else. I self destructed.

I have been afraid I would do it again, and instead of attracting people into my life that care I write said diary, I actively avoid them.

Zac only reads something if I tell him to in any kind of urgency. The rest of the time, he just surfs because he knows that writing is my interest. He doesn’t have to make it his. It just helps that he’s also a bookworm and I wake up to “Zac has gifted you” for my Kindle. He’s introduced me to writers I never would have discovered on my own. He also knows I’ll read anything, so just send me what he likes. I don’t need him to find me things he thinks I’ll like, because I’ll dig into whatever since he likes it. I’m not being cute or coy. If Zac likes something, I probably will, too. None of that classic gender role shit, because he’s fairly femme looking for a man and I’m fairly butch looking for a woman. Christian evangelicals and queer radicals all get what they want and everyone wins.

The part about Christian Evangelicals winning was way more about being afraid to walk into just any bar holding a woman’s hand than it was about hoping they ever win anything. And how it would be twice as bad for Zac to walk into just any bar holding a man’s hand.

It’s important to me not to project heterosexual privilege, and when people can tell that Zac is queer, it means something to me. When I’m not glued to his hip, there’s an equal chance that someone is going to say something nasty to us. It’s why I don’t want to date straight men again. It would be too harsh to say never, although I’ve said it. If it happens, you’ll know something extraordinary has happened and it is a flaw I’m willing to overlook. The benefit would have to be huge.

Bryn has the same outlook that I do. Say what you want, we’ll work it out. I just collaborate with her a lot so she has a rough outline of what I’m going to talk about She reminds me of past history so I have a jumping off point to connect the past to the present. Developing our relationship is the best thing I’ve ever done for myself because I don’t have many people in my life with whom I share that much history.

It’s how I would have liked my relationship with Supergrover to go, but she didn’t like bringing up the past for frames of reference and didn’t want to collaborate with me for the future. She has just influenced every single thing I’ve written here because I was workshopping the idea with her, first. She was getting the rough drafts because I wasn’t publishing my letters to her. I was going back and taking the feelings out of them that read universal. I was taking the details that made it too personal to the two of us and casting them aside. When she cut contact with me, she was no longer that internal monologue, so she wasn’t hearing my thought process every day like she had for the last 10 years.

She didn’t like the play because I stopped giving her the brochure.

I am not comparing the two women to each other, only the reason they are both so valuable to me. My history with Bryn starts in 1997. My history with Supergrover starts in 2013. Both of them have palaces in my head because they’ve lived there long enough to create them. Bryn likes hers. Supergrover doesn’t. I am not turning one away in favor of the other. I am giving my energy to the one who needs me.

I have needed Supergrover from the moment I laid eyes on her. She needed me. I still need her, but I can’t put energy toward her because I don’t feel needed. She told me that she’s read through many lines, and I think it was probably that she thought I’d found a new toy and I’d forgotten what she meant to me, has always meant to me.

I stopped responding to her because I was willing to do anything for her and I didn’t feel a quarter of that coming back at me. It doesn’t mean that she didn’t feel it. It means that I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t get her to interpret it. I didn’t want to be the equivalent of the girlfriend who obsesses over the meaning of intended punctuation……………… anymore.

I missed laughing when she flipped me shit about things, missed having make up text after we fought, missed telling her I loved her and I missed her and that being a good thing.

That’s always what I’ve meant by “showing up.” “Loving me enough to struggle.” Lay out your thoughts, fears, dreams, hopes, secrets, lies, all of it. I used to be that place for her, and I will always be there if our differences are reconciled and celebrated. There’s no possible way I could tell our story as if it was fact. You’re not even getting the whole picture in my head because I can only write one line at once. So, not only are you not getting her side of the story, she’s not correcting anything with either one of us. Your guess as to what her story might be is absolutely as valid as mine. Other people influence her behavior to an enormous degree, but I don’t write about them because I do not have a relationship with them. Here’s a big for-instance. I learned about Michael way too late for that knowledge to be helpful. But over time, he became a useful coping mechanism. That our relationship could be virtual because theirs was on the ground. I didn’t have to worry about her- he had it handled. Remember, in my head, she’s six years old with a lot of layers to cover up that fact. I needed her to have a boyfriend. I needed her to get married. I needed her to be the country mouse to my city mouse. Knowing that I would have run to the drugstore in the middle of the night if she was sick didn’t have to eat at me because she already had someone to do that.

I wish she would just take in the enormity of the things I’ve said that I don’t regret, like “of course I’ll want to be the first one tested if you need an organ. Please.” To me, that promise is every bit as real as running to Walgreens at 0300. I didn’t do anything because she needed me to do it. I did it because I saw it needed doing.

Although before I gave her an organ, we would have had a very serious conversation about the YouTube video in which she woke up from surgery queer as a three dollar bill. Just the weirdest organ rejection side effect ever.

It has been long enough since I’ve wanted to be the person that ran to the drugstore at 0300 that I know within myself just how much I am…………

The Man Who Regrets, and The Man Who Forgets

Into the Multiverse

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe your life in an alternate universe.

I am good at a lot of things. I’m going to write until I find something real. That might be in one scene, that might take a couple. Today is one of those days where I just have to start the tap running and hope something comes out. I am very low energy today, but I’m fried. I’ve written an entry every day for over a month- today is my 40th day in a row. I know that I am posting more than normal because I can’t find things as easy when I go back. 😉 I am dedicated to letting the past stay there, so I don’t link to anything. If you’ve missed it, good luck. It’s a different way of reading the web, and it is successful. That’s because people know they’re OG and can prove it. A true Fanagan knows what my life was like in 2013 and still does, so I can make jokes about things I’ve written without all of you knowing what I’m saying.

It creates intimacy, and it keeps blowback to a minimum because if someone didn’t read something about them, they generally won’t go look it up unless someone sends them a link. Trust me when I say that no one ever lets someone know when I’ve said something glowing about them. It’s a lot to want to escape from, which is why my inner circle is so small. I cannot have anyone in my circle who doesn’t understand that they are a complete person. That they are light and dark and angels and demons and hot sauce and peanut butter. All of ’em. None of us can truly be changed by the other, and no one gets changed by my silly web site, because they don’t pay attention to it unless they want to be here. There is no requirement on being a reader and being my friend. But when I don’t have friends who care about my writing, it makes me comfortable enough to continue. My writing matters. My personal relationship with every one of you does not.

If Hottie McHotterson wanted to define me by one entry and I was happy about it, it would have been “Go Tell the Bees,” preferably the audio version as I think it means more in my voice. I’d re-record it if I had spare time and server space, because I was so emotional the first time around. But it got me where I needed to be. Full of love, anger, remorse, grief….. and also joy. In one scene I told her about the day she was having a moment and I told her that we were sitting outside with a glass of wine in the sunshine, and we worked at GEICO.

That would be a good jumping off point if only because I’ve thought about that picnic for 10 years, and have imagined it many times. However, I can make our friendship look good. I can do nothing for working at GEICO.

So, I’ll write about what I could have done had my life followed the track that most people’s do. I used to be married, and I had all the hope in the world for that relationship. In fact, I was married twice on too much hope. With one, it was that we were the wrong personality type for each other. With the other, we were so much alike that we didn’t take our conflicts as seriously as they should have been taken for far too long to course correct. I’m going to write about being married to Kathleen, since it’s the closest to my real life now. I could have stayed in Alexandria after we met. It’s an alternate history that starts in college as opposed to 20 years ago.

I am alone in the doctor’s office. Kathleen would have come with me, but she’s at a softball game. I’m flipping through a magazine when she comes in. She’s smiling.

Leslie…. it took.

I say, “are you sure?” This woman has run three blood tests, but I’m asking if she’s sure….. #thankselizabethwarren

The doctor’s glasses slip a little on her nose and she looks at me like she’s gotten an A on the group project. “Your little monsters are going to own this town.” She knows she can say stuff like that to me, that I already feel like there has been some sort of alien invasion…. one that I can’t feel yet….. but she can. There are two heartbeats, both of them strong. We weren’t trying for twins, just a side effect of the implanted embroyos. We only did two, because Kathleen is Catholic and neither one of us wanted to think about having to remove them. I just hope that they turn out looking completely different from the jump. Otherwise, I will have to write their names with Sharpies on their foreheads. If I don’t, I know myself. One baby will get fat, one will look like it’s malnourished, all because I’m embarrassed that I don’t know which child is which. Thank God there’s not a chance they’re identical. There’s a chance they won’t even be the same race, because we didn’t use one donor. We chose based on education. Both donors majored in math- if I’m going to be of help in the homework department, it’s not there.

My doctor has noticed that I have left the conversation and that I am off in my own little world….. and when I get home, I’m going to blow up someone else’s. Oh, wait. I’m not going to need to go home to blow up someone’s world.

Kathleen is at work softball, but my mom and dad aren’t.

Kathleen is at work softball, but my sister isn’t.

That’s three whole ass phone calls to jump up and down and say “it’s twins” before I go home, because I know how my parents and sister are going to react. I cannot predict my wife, and I stopped trying long ago. I’m surprised she didn’t want to quit trying to have babies at all. She’s been distant lately, but I don’t care. The entire world fits into my tiny 5’2 frame.

I’m not in it for her reaction. I’m in it for my kids.’

It’s not that I think she won’t make a good mom. I don’t think she makes a very good wife, but she’s what I’ve got and I’ve made promises I intend to keep. Besides, I don’t really have to pay attention to her if I don’t feel like it. I have better things to focus on than who she’s screwing this week. If it makes her happy to have boy toys over a real relationship, I can only go with the flow. I cannot change her behavior. I can only change mine.

If I didn’t have to tell Kathleen I was pregnant, I probably wouldn’t. I wanted the real deal, and I got it….. but having everything costs something. If I had it to do over, I might have chosen differently. Now, it’s all a matter of dancing with who done brought me. I am only asking her to hold onto more hands when she twirls.

My doctor says “you’re not even really here anymore, are you?” I apologize and say, “I absolutely was not, but I am now. How do we do this?” She tells me to cut down on the pizza and beer (I found this banana cove one out in Fairfax…) is non-negotiable. I look at her and say, “I can understand why babies don’t like pizza, but why is beer a problem?” She laughs because she knows I’m joking and we start making a diet plan.

It will all go to shit later. I know it will. Kathleen and I do not have the emotional fortitude to fight through something like this. But right now? In this moment? She’s going to hear the most important words of her life and I get to say them.

“Sweetheart, I went to the doctor today…… and we’re going to need to do a lot of shopping. I’m not pregnant with a baby. I’m pregnant with two.”

She will look at me with the same wide-eyed wonder I gave my ob/gyn.

“Are you sure?”

Describing the Color Choice

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Part of the reason my entries about the woman I call “Supergrover” is because she won’t answer a lot of basic questions about herself, and yet I have access to her heart in a beautiful and unique way. I got in through the back door in the hacker sense of the word, because nothing would ever have happened between us if we hadn’t kept to staying out of each other’s real lives.

I realized a few days ago that I had burned down the entire house on mutual friends. However, I wasn’t being encouraged to do so in any way. It was my reaction to her words, always. I cannot describe what she or anyone else went through at that time in our lives, and so far I’ve been handed more confusion than answers.

The closest I’ve ever gotten to feeling secure is “someday, perhaps” and “also. Thank you.” She’s quiet when she’s sincere, and those words echo just as much as the ones that hurt me. There is no possible way that she does not come across as a 3D character, and I will not believe it. I cannot write both the entry she referenced and a letter to her husband telling him to be good to her because she wouldn’t let me be good to her as well. If I can think those thoughts, why can she only accept the dark ones as the truth? Why can she not see that I am woven into her like The Impossible Girl, the one whose DNA is spread within The Doctor’s. I got there by only being her inner monologue as well. Our similarities show in our writing. One thing touched me deeply, and she said that I portrayed her as flat as if it’s not a wheel with many spokes. I told her that if she took every entry from March until now, she’d see the many different spokes in the wheel. That I remembered every one and wrote them all down.

You cannot think someone is worth nothing and a villain if you’re willing to go toe to toe with her husband and have it out. Who does that? Someone who thinks there’s no such thing as “the friend zone.” It’s better when we’re in each other’s lives than it is to be apart. I’ve written about that pain in exquisite detail so that I don’t forget a moment of it. There was a passion and drive within me to have her in my life at whatever level she could accept me into hers, but then it became about the cost/benefit analysis of living in so much confusion. I told her it caused anger and issues that needed to be resolved. She didn’t want to resolve them. At no time did it mean that I became that person who wouldn’t safety net her through anything. I am still her red telephone, and what I know is that Bryn and Zac would not deprive me of her, because they’re always rooting for me to succeed. I just would have to balance Bryn’s needs as well, because I cannot abandon her after the ways in which she’s made me grow. We have the ability to have a very deep and meaningful relationship because we have lived in the same place. We were raised by the same “parents.” We both lived to tell the tale. She’s my partner in terms of the one I’d want you to go to if something was up with me where I couldn’t be contacted. That’s because she’s the only one I’ll talk to when I really need to reach out. She feels the same way about me.

Just because you haven’t gotten married to someone doesn’t mean that loyalty and confidentiality mean less. That my vows to my friends are less important than the ones I’d make to a partner. I look to Bryn’s face for love because I can. I would look at my beautiful girl the same way if I thought she thought it was a privilege to be let in. But that power imbalance kept both of us from really laying things on the table.

Oh, the stories we could have told. Stories that are both true and factual. I still have the picture in my head of a photo shoot I want with her, and I hope it makes her laugh if she remembers what I’m talking about. Let’s just say it involves gender role reversal and leave it at that. I’ve checked with me and her husband absolutely wants this picture, too.

To think that I want to paint her as the villain when I’ve poured out everything in terms of how I feel about her makes me lean on the memories that make me laugh.

Here’s the best one of all. In ten years, she has never sent me a voice mail of her saying her own name. I say it like it sounds. She says it the way she likes it, but I can’t correct it and I’ve been saying it wrong the whole time.

I call her all kinds of nicknames because I can’t say her fucking real one.

Now that’s describing all the colors. She’s not a villain. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met in my life, and I don’t understand why she thinks she isn’t.

She is my red and my violet. My whites, greys, and blacks.

I paint my feelings as fact, but never once have I used PhotoShop to make it prettier, or to crop something so that the framing looks better…. like I have that good an eye naturally.

It’s all a spectrum. It’s all an ADHD mess. The temperature of our relationship centers on hot with drive to reconnect, not hot with passion. It never will. But painting my feelings as fact shouldn’t go unnoticed here, either.

I love her, and I won’t apologize for it anymore. I don’t even care if she believes it. I know it to be true, and I cannot be held together by one entry alone. I hope, for once, she’ll focus on this one.

It’s one of my favorite colors.